Vale stood at the very edge of the teleportation platform, his boots nearly touching the frost-slick metal as the world above him unraveled.

  Around him, countless students stared upward, their gazes unfocused and hollow, some shifting slowly between the two rifts as if their minds refused to accept that both were real. Others could not move at all. Fear had locked them in place.

  Vale’s thoughts were chaos.

  Two rifts appeared.

  Two open wounds in the sky.

  Crimson and violet clashed above them, colors bleeding into one another like warring storms. Lightning of impossible hues tore through the clouds, violent arcs colliding and fracturing the heavens. The sight was almost beautiful, terrifyingly so. A cosmic ballet of annihilation.

  If death were not standing at the threshold of the world, Vale knew he might have admired it.

  But now?

  With extinction looming seconds away, beauty felt obscene.

  His eyes widened further, vision trembling as his body betrayed him. Vale took an involuntary step backward, boots scraping against the ice-laced surface of the platform.

  Then he heard it.

  A sound rolled out from the crimson rift, deep, grinding, wrong.

  It wasn’t a roar in the way beasts roared.

  It sounded like a thousand chainsaws screaming through flesh, layered with wailing cries that carried agony so raw it clawed at the soul. The sound reverberated through the air, through the sea, through him.

  Vale’s skin crawled.

  Hopelessness seeped into his chest like poison.

  He staggered again, nearly losing his footing as the sea below raged violently. Massive waves shattered the frozen surface, ice breaking and reforming endlessly, yet the teleportation platform itself remained eerily stable, as if something unseen anchored it in defiance of the chaos.

  As Vale steadied himself, a familiar presence stepped into his peripheral vision.

  Chrome.

  The towering machine stood beside him, metal frame gleaming faintly beneath the storm-lit sky. Vale turned to look at him, his expression twisted with fear, regret, and something dangerously close to guilt.

  Chrome tried to smile. It was gentle, careful, but it only made Vale feel worse. The crimson gate had fully manifested now. It was no longer unstable, no longer forming. Whatever lay beyond it now had access to their world.

  Vale lowered his gaze, despair pressing down on his shoulders like a physical weight. Then a voice echoed inside his mind once more.

  “Hey… I know I said I’d leave you alone,” Zellion said quietly, without his usual smugness, “but I think I owe you an apology.”

  Vale lifted his head sharply and took a step forward, his eyes never leaving the sky. “An apology?” he snapped aloud, disbelief sharp in his voice.

  Chrome turned his metallic head toward him, optics narrowing slightly. “Who are you talking to?” he asked.

  Vale hesitated for a half-second, then answered flatly, exhaustion bleeding into his tone. “My arm.”

  Chrome blinked. Inside Vale’s head, Zellion sighed.

  “Listen, kid, I didn’t know he had that kind of history, alright?” Zellion said defensively. “I just figured, since Abby said he was unusually strong for a mortal, that he’d be your best bet.”

  Vale’s eyes flared with fury. “You thought?” he barked, teeth clenched.

  Under normal circumstances, he might have dissected everything Zellion had already revealed, his origins, his master, the fragments of stars. But now, none of that mattered. All that mattered was the end of the world hanging over them.

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  Zellion sighed again, this time longer, then his tone shifted, calmer, sharper, serious. “Listen to me. If everything goes wrong, I’ll call Mist. She’ll handle it, especially since her child is already there with you.”

  Vale froze. “…You could have called her from the beginning?” he asked slowly, disbelief dripping from every word.

  Zellion’s response came with heavy sarcasm. “Oh yeah, great idea. Let’s summon a goliath of uncreation as our first solution, a being that could passively erase your universe just by existing.”

  Vale’s breath caught, his eyes widening further, heart pounding. Silently, stunned, he whispered inside his mind, “…What are you?”

  Zellion answered without hesitation, confidence unshaken. “Didn’t I tell you already? I’m the first fragment of the stars.” Then he vanished again, his presence receding completely.

  For a moment, Vale barely noticed the rifts. A goliath of uncreation… The term echoed in his mind. He had read about them countless times, entities that had reached the final stage of spawn evolution. Gods in all but name. Fully autonomous. Infinitely aware. Equal to enigma's and gods alike. Beyond even crowned. And Zellion knew one?

  Vale looked down at his metallic arm once more, the question escaping his lips in a whisper. “What are you…?”

  That was when the first step sounded. The sound did not echo. It detonated. BOOM. The platform shook. The sea recoiled. Another step followed, heavier, louder, each impact sounding less like footsteps and more like collapsing mountains.

  A low growl rolled out from the crimson gate, vibrating through bone and blood alike. Then something emerged. First, a skull, massive, draconic and exposed. Hollow eye sockets stared into the world, empty and eternal. As it pushed forward, the rest of the creature followed, its body vast beyond comprehension, at least four hundred meters tall and far longer than it was tall.

  Its form looked freshly skinned, muscle and sinew exposed beneath layers of jagged bone and twisted horns. Spines jutted outward at impossible angles, and the air warped around it as if reality itself feared proximity.

  The sea parted beneath its presence, water pulling away instinctively, unwilling to touch it.

  Vale stood frozen.

  “…A Titan,” he whispered.

  Titans were the second-highest classification a spawn could achieve, second only to goliaths. Any being exceeding two hundred meters in any dimension earned the title.

  But this…

  Vale focused, forcing his senses outward.

  Then his blood turned to ice.

  Its atum density.

  It was a Herald, the eighth stage of evolution.

  Vale stumbled back, horror overtaking him completely.

  Even Chrome, fully powered, fully awakened, would have been annihilated in a moment.

  This thing…

  This thing could destroy the entire planet in a single act if it so desired.

  And it had just arrived.

  Vale fell to his knees for the second time.

  The impact barely registered, his body gave out long before his mind could process what his eyes were seeing.

  A second presence pushed its way through the rift opposite the titanic Herald.

  The wingless monstrosity of bone and ruin, its body bristling with a thousand jagged horns, shifted, narrowing its hollow gaze as it sensed the newcomer. The air between the two rifts trembled, strained as if reality itself were holding its breath.

  Then a draconic face emerged.

  Onyx-black.

  Its scales drank in the thunderous light above, reflecting nothing, like polished obsidian devouring the storm. The dragon was immense, its sheer size rivaling, even surpassing, the Herald. As its massive form advanced, the rift behind it distorted violently, struggling to contain something so vast.

  Vale’s breath hitched.

  Dagon.

  The name did not need to be spoken.

  Every student knew it.

  No, him.

  The first great hero.

  The first great despair.

  The dragon who had saved more lives than any being in recorded history… and taken more than any catastrophe ever had. A savior soaked in blood. A legend etched into monuments and mass graves alike.

  As Dagon continued forward, his full form revealed itself.

  Two enormous wings unfurled, vast, living curtains of darkness, spreading wide as he ascended into the air. They did not flap at first. They simply existed, blotting out swathes of the sky, casting the world below into shadow.

  His forelegs were long and lean, built for speed and precision, ending in talons sharp enough to rend mountains. His hind legs were thick and powerful, forged for balance and raw strength, each step sending ripples through the air itself.

  Violet eyes burned beneath a crown of majestic, jagged horns, their gaze locked unflinchingly onto the Herald before him.

  His tail swept behind him, lined with countless spikes, each one a weapon, each one a memory of war. His back bristled with bone and scale, a living fortress shaped by centuries of battle.

  Silence fell.

  Not the absence of sound, but the kind of silence that forces the world to listen.

  Vale did not even bother sensing Dagon’s atum.

  He already knew.

  Whatever the outcome of this confrontation… it would not be something mortals survived.

  Around him, students stared in frozen disbelief.

  Some trembled.

  Others wept silently.

  And all of them asked the same unspoken question:

  Would the fallen hero save them again…

  …or would he simply add them to his ledger of dead?

  The Herald moved first.

  It reared back and unleashed a roar, a sound so immense, so steeped in suffering, that it seemed to tear directly into the soul. It was not merely loud, it was pain. A howl forged from endless agony, enough to break the will of even the bravest warrior.

  Several students collapsed, clutching their heads.

  Vale clenched his teeth, blood trickling from his nose.

  Dagon watched.

  Just once.

  Then he answered.

  His roar exploded outward, raw and absolute, an ancient proclamation that shook the heavens. It was not born of madness or torment, but of finality. A declaration that the age of hesitation had ended.

  The sky fractured with sound.

  The sea recoiled.

  And in that single thunderous cry, vale understood,

  This was not a battle that had a good ending in any way.